San Diego’s Craft Revolution

Iconic Art for '60s San Diego

For curator David Hampton, Svetozar Rudakovich’s 1967 “Double Door” may represent the perfect storm of San Diego ‘60s design.

The Yugoslavian artist and his American wife Ruth, also an accomplished artist, moved to Encinitas in 1959 after nearly a decade of bureaucratic and political delays, failed escapes, and for Svetozar, even imprisionment.

They immediately joined the Allied Craftmen where one of their first friends was James Hubbell, whose activities at the time included carving intricate wooden doors.

Like Hubbell, Rudakovich worked in a variety of media and was inspired to carve his own wooden doors. Then, during a visit to the home of Dana Fayman and another Allied Craftsmen member, photographer Lynn Fayman, Radakovich noticed a fiberglass door in the Fayman home made by Fayman’s son-in-law, Carl Ekstrom.

Fayman introduced Radakovich to Ekstrom, who invited the artist to his garage near Windansea Beach where he shaped surfboards. Ekstrom showed Radakovich how to work with fiberglass, and they collaborated on the doors with Rudakovich carving the mold and Radkovich applying the fiberglass and the coating.

They then took the finished doors to Windansea, where Fayman photographed them.

The photograph and the doors appeared in the 1968 California Design 10 at the Pasadena Art Museum and the doors were shown at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. They were eventually purchased by Ruth Rudakovich’s sister, Louise Clark, who took them off her house to lend them to the Mingei for the exhibition.

“Where else are you going to get this European art background, combined with surfing, and put together into something that gets shown in L.A. and New York?” said Hampton. “It tells the whole story.”

Douglas Deeds; Chair made with recycled beer cans, first made in Syracuse, New York, ca. 1960.
/ Courtesy of Douglas Deeds

David Hampton has spent much of the last decade living with, collecting, researching and discussing — often with the artists themselves — examples of midcentury San Diego art and design.

But even he was surprised, going through the catalogs of the California Design exhibitions at the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon) in the ’60s and ’70s, to find how many San Diego artists were represented — James Hubbell, Svetozar Radakovich, Rhoda Lopez, Ellamarie and Jackson Woolley, among others.

“It was like, oh my God, this is amazing,” Hampton said. “To go back to the indexes and to see all these San Diego artists was kind of a revelation. It just struck me: We had it going on.”

That, in a nutshell, is the point of the exhibition Hampton is guest curating for the Mingei International Museum, “San Diego’s Craft Revolution — From Post-War Modern to California Design.”

One of two San Diego institutional exhibitions involved with the Getty-initiated, regionwide “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980” (the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s “Phenomenal” is the other), “San Diego’s Craft Revolution” focuses on furniture design, enameling, architectural craft and body ornament.

“We wanted to do something that would honor and respect our history as well as many of the artists who are important to the Mingei,” said Christine Knoke, director of exhibitions.